| Tweaking the Cooling | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I started with an idle CPU temperature of 30°C and stressed 48°. There's nothing wrong with that, but ... maybe it could be better!
The CPU: First I replaced the OEM heatsink/fan that came with the TBird, with a ThermalTake Volcano II. I also cleaned off the white RadioShack thermal goop and used Arctic Silver II: 
Preparing to clean off the old goop, as well as the thermal-spongy stuff that came on the bottom of the V2 (note the Chrome Orb with its nefarious raised ring o' fire...) 
V2 (clean!) on the left, OEM on the right (note the heatsink surfaces are flat ... what a good idea!)   
TBird & shim (both clean) ... Arctic Silver II (too much I now know...) ... V2 installed! And the grand result was ... no cooling improvement. Ah, well.... The Case: I started with a 3DCool Tornado 1000 case, which is incredibly cool to start with. I was not willing to try water cooling or peltiers, or cutting holes in that lovely case. I had a couple of case fans sitting around, though, so I thought I'd see if I could gain anything by using them to blow around more air in the case. I positioned one to blow onto the CPU area and the other to blow at the PCI cards. Those big flat IDE cables can also impair airflow -- especially since I had, besides the usual cables for the floppy, CD-RW, and HD (the secondary drive, on this PC) IDE cables, an IDE cable from the SCSI card to the ATA100 HD and another one from the SBLive! card to its front-panel thingy. So I purchased a couple of fully rounded IDE cables. So, this is what I tried:  At some point in this process I also figured out that the physical placement of my case made a difference. It's in a sort of shelf in an Ikea desk thingy, and it's a bit warmer when it's in there than when out:  
In the shelf ................. out of the shelf.... I don't have the option of putting the PC anywhere else, but clearly I needed to compare only like temperatures. I also began monitoring the case temperature as well as the CPU temperature. With all of this in mind, and my 2 added fans, here's what I found:
Well, alrighty then! My new fans not only failed to enhance the cooling, they actually hurt a bit.... I decided the thing to do was to get more of the warm air out of the case. I bought a drive fan, which is designed to blow air over a harddrive installed behind it -- so I reversed the fans, moved my CD-RW and SBLive! front panel thingy down, and installed the drive fan in the top slot (since warm air rises...). Then I mounted a case fan to blow air up to where the drive fans are:  
Note that the case fan is in the same place where I had my fan #1 above, but blowing in the opposite direction. Result:
At this point I declared victory and went back to playing with overclocking. At some point I may decide to install an exhaust fan by cutting a hole in the top of the case, but that's a bit beyond me at this point.... . . . . . . . . . . . . OK -- now this is silly. That dang Chrome Orb annoyed me with its uselessness, and since the fan looked so cool I figured maybe I could use it. It's attached to the heatsink with three screws ... now, with a few Lego pieces and a small drill, voila:   It has been suggested to me that a Lego computer case would be cool ... I'm still thinking.... So I mounted it in the case in the obvious way, as shown on the left, and got no result at all. Then I put my fingers in there and felt the breeze and realized it blows the other way, so I turned it around as shown on the right:   Result: okay, so the dang case is already cooling so well that adding that cool little fan didn't change anything -- but it is cool (looking, and it blows alotta air) and I'm sure I'll find a use for it sometime, where it will make a difference.... |
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